A Clinic In Garage Punk

Plenty of bands will tell you that mainstream music is in need of emergency reconstructive surgery, but only Clinic actually comes dressed for the job.

With its teal operating room scrubs and white surgical masks, the four-piece from Liverpool, England, is simultaneously nightmarish and cartoonish, mixing art-rock and punk to create sounds capable of anesthetizing listeners and annihilating their eardrums. The band attempted to do both at Pearl Street in Northampton Saturday night.

Instead of singing songs with medical themes and drawing attention to their costumes, the band members ignored their gimmick, wailing on their instruments and thanking the crowd for applause just like any group might. This unflinching commitment to weirdness, though admirable, also made the band seem distant and detached, recalling the famous Billy Idol song ``Eyes Without a Face.''

More accurately, Clinic amounted to eight eyeballs and a mouth, as singer Ade Blackburn cut a hole in his mask to allow for non-garbled vocals, not that his thick-accented mumblings were particularly intelligible over the band's organ, guitar and drum assault. At times, Blackburn would trade guitar for melodica, adding an unsettling, spaghetti western-like vibe to the mix.

Of Clinic's two sonic tendencies, formless experimentation and scalpel-sharp garage punk, the latter worked consistently better. On ``W.D.Y.Y.B,'' from the album ``Winchester Cathedral,'' for example, the band discovered its proper dosage, sounding like Brit-pop superstars awaking groggy and restless after a 10-year coma. The similarly chugging ``Monkey on My Back'' reinforced the idea that the band should limit its conceptual leanings to stage attire and stick with straightforward rock `n' roll in its songwriting.

Even the most meandering moments were intriguing, though, as blue and green lights set the stage as a sort of secret underground laboratory. During songs that contained background vocals, the eeriness increased as the source of each voice was disguised by the surgical masks. The bass player would squint and the drummer's mask would occasionally get sucked into his mouth to indicate singing, but beyond that voices floated disembodied.

As far as masked musicians go, Clinic isn't the creepiest thing out there.That honor, for the eighth year running, belongs to Michael Jackson. Still, the band has found an interesting way of coaxing new life out of old garages, doing for hospital chic what the Ramones once did for the motorcycle jacket.